How to Use Reddit for Keyword and Content Research

Reddit is home to a wealth of information that millions of people around the world take advantage of and find community in. 

In fact, as of 2024, there are over 500 million users on Reddit and over 100,000 active subreddits. Reddit is an immensely successful social media platform and a goldmine for marketers. 

As a marketer, Reddit can be a source of inspiration to see what your target audience is talking about and how to serve their needs more effectively.  

In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of adding Reddit to your keyword and content research strategy to bring your SEO and marketing to the next level!

What is Reddit

Reddit is a well-known website that is home to online communities where people can talk with one another about virtually anything. 

Each community is specialized and categorized into a subreddit, where people can follow topics to match their interests. For example, marketers can find a community in the r/marketing subreddit to stay up to date with the latest news in the industry, read people’s stories, and engage in conversations relating to marketing.

Reddit is the internet's version of the town square or public forum where people can express themselves and their thoughts.

‍

Why Use Reddit for Keyword Research

Since Reddit is home to countless bustling and engaged communities, it can be a great resource for marketers to take a look at what their target audience is talking about. As with any great marketing strategy, researching your target audience is critical, and using Reddit can give you a leg up on the competition. 

Marketers can use Reddit to see what types of questions potential customers are asking to help guide keyword research. Observing the way people ask questions on Reddit can also help with coming up with relevant keywords that will boost your SEO strategy. People on Reddit may be asking questions that you normally wouldn’t find through a normal Google search, which can prove to be an untapped resource. 

It is also important to identify what questions are more likely to get responses compared to others. Finding questions with high response rates can help marketers decide what to prioritize in their keyword optimization strategy. If one of your keywords isn’t getting any engagement, using Reddit could help identify popular alternatives.

How to Use Reddit for Keyword Research

Okay so Reddit is a goldmine for keyword and content research, but what does that mean practically?

We’ve worked with over 100 companies to help them build content strategies that rank and convert, and here are the three ways we use Reddit for keyword research:

• Find the subreddits your target customer cares about
• See what your customers care about/struggle with the most
• Use Google to rapidly brainstorm questions from your target subreddit

I’ll walk you through these in detail next.

How to find the Subreddits your customer cares about

The first step to using Reddit for keyword research is to find the subreddits your customers hang out in. You could use Reddit’s search functionality, but my favorite way is to search for topics I think my customers care about and add “Reddit” to the end of the search. 

If you want to get fancy, you could add  “site:reddit.com” to the search results to only get answers from Reddit. 

For example, suppose I have an e-commerce site selling insoles online. A simple search for “insoles Reddit” yields results from three subreddits:

• Buy it for life -  a subreddit dedicated to buying items that last for a long amount of time
• Her one bag - a subreddit dedicated to women who travel/spend time out in the city
• Hiking - a subreddit dedicated to hiking and hiking products

This gives me three potential markets for insoles: people who want them to last a long time, people who buy them for fashion (or bear fashion in mind), and people who use them for particular activities.

Starting here helps me find the right subreddit to dig deeper into for the next steps. 

How to understand your customer through their subreddit

Once you find a subreddit that your customers spend time in, take time to browse through it and note the following:

• What questions come up often?
• What questions/posts are scheduled?
• Is there a wiki/guide with common questions and answers?

This will give you rich information about what your audience may find useful. It will also provide you with insight into their most common challenges and struggles. 

Take the fitness subreddit for example:

‍

The fitness has scheduled threads for:

• Questions
• Sharing physique photos for feedback
• Workout routines
• Stories/complaints

They also have links to guides on:

• Programs
• Weightloss
• Muscle gaining
• A glossary of terms

If you have a fitness website (whether it’s a blog, gym, or personal training business) this is invaluable information that you have at your fingertips. It’s essentially a rough blueprint for a content strategy you can create to set your website up as a resource for your target customer. 

How to use Google to brainstorm questions from Reddit

Now that you have a subreddit identified and a loose content strategy based on the top questions and wiki information, let’s kick things up a notch. 

I like to mix and match my keyword research with a keyword research tool and Reddit. Here’s how:

Once I settle on a subreddit to dig deeper into, I take the keywords that I’ve found through a keyword research tool (like the one we built for Centori) and I search the subreddit for those keywords. Suppose I have a business in the HR/Employee engagement space, I could take a keyword like “employee engagement” and search it on Google while appending a subreddit like so:

‍

This will return the Reddit posts that Google has indexed and organized:

‍

This gives me a few longtail keyword ideas:

• Employee engagement survey
• Employee engagement ideas
• Employee engagement activities

And I can turn around and search again for those longtail versions for more questions:

‍

‍

By doing searching this way, you can find more insight into your customer base by hearing from them directly and sometimes through an unfiltered lens to listen to their true thoughts.

Leveraging Reddit in your Google searches can help expand your potential keywords to keep your content more updated and relevant to your target audience. 

Level Up Your SEO Strategy With Our Complete SEO Strategy Guide

Incorporating Reddit into your keyword strategy is a small part of a successful overall SEO strategy. Gathering insight from your target audience is a cheat code to becoming a successful marketer. Ultimately, knowing where to find them and what to prioritize is key to increasing clicks and gaining more traction on search engines. 

Not sure where to start? Download our free SEO Strategy Guide for a complete walkthrough of our process to bring your SEO to the next level!

‍